There is scant empirical economic research regarding the way that Latin American governments efficiently allocate their spending across different functions to achieve higher growth. While most papers restrict their analysis to the size of government, much less is known about the composition of...

Virtually all Latin American and Caribbean countries have established specialized organizations to promote their exports. Existing analyses of these organizations are at best partial and fragmentary. This paper aims at overcoming these limitations of the literature by presenting a consistent,...

This paper documents disparities in cognitive development-as measured by a receptive vocabulary test-between children from households with high and low socioeconomic status (SES) in two different phases of childhood (before and after early school years) in four developing countries: Peru,...

This paper seeks to identify the most promising fiscal strategy to boost long-term economic growth in Argentina and quantify its effects. To this end, the authors updated a growth-diagnostics study for Argentina and corroborated that low appropriability of social returns and insufficient public...

Inflation targeting has been adopted in a set of emerging economies, including eight countries in Latin America. The success of this regime may depend critically on the credibility of the target and the expectation that the authorities will take appropriate actions if the target is breached....

Between 2000 and 2013, Latin America has considerably reduced poverty (from 46.3% to 29.7% of the population). In this paper, we use synthetic panels to show that, despite progress, the region remains characterized by substantial vulnerability that also affects the rising middle-class. More...

This paper surveys gender wage gaps in Colombia from 1994 to 2006, using matching comparisons to examine the extent to which individuals with similar human capital characteristics earn different wages. Three sub-periods are considered: 1994-1998; 2000- 2001; and 2002- 2006. The gaps dropped from the...

This paper surveys gender and ethnic wage gaps in 18 Latin American countries, decomposing differences using matching comparisons as a non-parametric alternative to the Blinder-Oaxaca (BO) decomposition. It is found that men earn 9-27 percent more than women, with high cross-country...

This paper complements the findings of Atal, Ñopo and Winder (2009) on gender and ethnic wage gaps for 18 Latin American countries circa 2005 by analyzing gender wage gaps for the same countries between circa 1992 and circa 2007. During this span the overall gender earnings gaps dropped about 7...

Using establishment-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey, we assess the market power of exporting firms across 16 countries in Latin America. Leveraging information on export destinations, as well as exchange rate and price data, we construct exchange rate-driven shocks to the...